Apple Powers College Supercomputer (Can you feel the power?}

BBC News ^ | October 12, 2003 | Ian Hardy

[quidnunc]

Everyone would love a supercomputer but with a price tag of around $100m each they are not easy to come by.

But in the United States staff and students at Virginia Tech have built one of the world's most powerful supercomputers for just $5m by plugging together hundreds of the latest computers from Apple.

The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by side, making it the world's most powerful "homebuilt" system.

It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes.

"Each individual G5 is a dual processor, 2GHZ machine with 4GB of memory. So it's extremely fast," said Pat Arvin, Project Coordinator at Virginia Tech.

The network is linked using 2,900 cables and runs at about 100 times faster than an average corporate network.

But the hard part of making a supercomputer is stability.

The project's chief architect, Srinidhi Varadarajan, had to write a special program called Deja Vu to ensure that if an individual computer crashed in the middle of a calculation lasting weeks, if not months, another computer would take over seamlessly.

"This is pretty much like open heart surgery because you're working on a computer and moving an application while it still continues to run," said Dr Varadarajan

"You cannot stop the program, actually, and that's the speciality of this system."

Heat and water

The supercomputer, unofficially nicknamed Big Mac, was built in just three months.

-snip-

[zencat]

Pretty cool. But it'll be 1,100 door stops in five years.

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[quidnunc]

zencat wrote: Pretty cool. But it'll be 1,100 door stops in five years.

As opposed to what, doorstops in two years for Windows machines?

[RS]

... The first they are using it for is searching the web for any useful software that will run on it .....

[elfman2]

"The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by side."

As a bonus, administration gets to keep the accompanying 1,100 AOL CDs with 50 free hours each.

[zencat]

"As opposed to what, doorstops in two years for Windows machines?"

Don't start with the Mac vs. Wintel, they're both just boxes designed to crunch numbers. It's just a comment on the rapid technological advancement a.k.a. Moore's law.

[quidnunc]

elfman2 wrote: As a bonus, administration gets to keep the accompanying 1,100 AOL CDs with 50 free hours each.

I wonder if Apple sold them 1,100 entended-warranty packages?

[Petronski]

The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by side, making it the world's most powerful "homebuilt" system.

I'm not an Apple-hater (I respect everything but the price), but I'm sure there's a pumchline to go with the line quoted above, I just don't know what it is.

[Orangedog]

Wonderful! Now there is a really big condesending computer that won't let me change any internal settings manually.

[Petronski]

I just knew y'all would come through. LOL

[TopQuark]

As opposed to what, doorstops in two years for Windows machines?

Geez, aren't we being defensive here...

As opposed to a mainframe supercomputer.

[Orangedog]

I don't trust a computer that is designed not to trust me.

[LenS]

This has already been done with PC's several years ago. I guess it took Apple this long to manufacture 1,100 computers.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Didn't Thinking Machine do this years ago with PCs?

[zencat]

"I guess it took Apple this long to manufacture 1,100 computers."

Now that's just trying to pour gasoline on a fire.

[TopQuark]

Yep; they are not the first.

I am curious what they are running on it, both the OS and the application. (I am not sure that mentioned Deja Vu is the OS). Do you know anything about that?

[brbethke]

It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second

Ah, the wonderful Theoretical Peak Performance number again. Betcha this pile o' PC's will be lucky to hit 5% of that on actual problems.

[Recluse]

from the article:
The power supply was another huge challenge. The supercomputer uses the same amount of electricity as 3,000 average sized homes.

Something is missing here. 1,100 computers using the power of 3,000 homes?

[quidnunc]

Recluse wrote: Something is missing here. 1,100 computers using the power of 3,000 homes?

It seems like a lot but maybe they're including the power used by the air-conditioning chillers.